The recent bomb explosions in a café in Istanbul and in a bus in the Aegean tourist resort of Kusadasi (in which five people died) have reminded the world that Turkey alongside London, Madrid, and Egypt remains a target of violent attack both by the secular far left (the Kurdish PKK and by Islamists who oppose its ties with the United States and Israel.
These are not the first bombings even in recent years, and Istanbul was, most notably, the site of major Islamist assaults in 2003. But they underline what appears, to the visitor returning to Turkey after several years, to be a pervasive mood of political concern about developments abroad and at home.
Also about Turkey in openDemocracy, see our debate The future of Turkey, which includes work by Murat Belge, Reinhard Hesse, Alex Rondos and an earlier article by Fred Halliday. Among the highlights:
Murat Belge, Turkey normal at last? (November 2002)
Murat Belge, The Turkish refusal (March 2003)
Reinhard Hesse, Turkish honey under a German moon (March 2004)
Fred Halliday, Turkey and the hypocrisies of Europe (December 2004)
Murat Belge, Between Turkey and Europe: why friendship is welcome (December 2004)
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Turkey is used to conflict and to international crisis, and the Turkish state has, over past decades, made its own distinctive contribution to such processes. But the mood now in this city, an ancient Hittite settlement in the centre of the country chosen by Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s as a more indigenous Turkish capital than the suspect cosmopolis of Istanbul, is now uneasy and edging on anger.
For this there are three reasons: Europe, Iraq, and domestic Turkish politics.
The European complex
The first is Europe. Turkey has been seeking membership of the European Union since the 1960s; in November 2004, Brussels finally agreed to open negotiations, due to commence on 3 October 2005. For the many Turks who, for cultural, economic and strategic reasons, want to join the union, this appeared a historic landmark.
In the ensuing months, however, things have gone wrong. The Turkish government itself has not acted to meet many of the conditions laid down by Europe for commencing the talks. At the same time serious opposition, not just to Turkish entry but to the very commencement of talks, has emerged inside the EU both at the popular level in the referendums in France and the Netherlands, and in statements by the Austrian government and by politicians expected soon to attain power, such as Nicolas Sarkozy in France and Angela Merkel in Germany. The latest Eurobarometer poll shows that 52% of Europeans oppose Turkish entry while 35% support it.
The formal Turkish response is to brush all this aside: Brussels must keep to its commitment to start negotiations, and in earnest, while the French and Dutch referendum results were not really about Turkey or Muslim immigration but a reflection of popular opposition to the effects of globalisation and the arrogance of the Brussels elite.
But there is also increasing nationalist irritation in Turkey at the way the enlargement process is being revised and new obstacles are being created on the European side besides the longstanding concerns about human rights, torture, women and Kurdish freedoms, new conditions relating to Cyprus and Armenia are being raised, apparently as a way of blocking the start of the October negotiations. That it was the Turks who, in 2004, accepted the United Nations settlement on Cyprus, and the Greeks, incited by bishops and demagogues, who rejected it, seems to have escaped the notice of the EU officials handling the negotiation.
In one sense, there is little the Turks can do about this. Some, despite current disagreements with the United States, argue that Turkey should stop trying to please the meddling and fickle Europeans and explore a fuller strategic and economic relationship with the US.
Some talk of closer links to the middle east and to the former Soviet republics, particularly those of the Turkish dunya (world), where various forms of Turkic language are spoken. But the whole basis of the modernisation of Turkey since the 1920s has rested on the claim that Turkey is already part of Europe: indeed some of the features of Turkish politics that the EU objects to, such as a rigid secularism and an authoritarian reformist state, are themselves reflections of modern European models.
The middle east, much in vogue in the 1970s, has proven to be economically unreliable and the source of many political problems. As for the dunya, the honeymoon is over: poor, remote and corrupt central Asian states offer little to the Turkish economy and there is also awareness of considerable hostility to Turks in these countries, as evident in the burning of Turkish banks and businesses in the riots in Kyrgyzstan.
Ties with the former Soviet world in general are certainly proliferating: two hours waiting in Istanbul airport reveals that, for every flight that leaves for Paris, Berlin or London, at least one other leaves for Bishkek, Baku, Kishinev or Kharkov. And recently Vladimir Putin visited Turkey the first visit by a Russian political leader in the tempestuous four centuries of their relationship. But there is no substitute here for integration into the European Union.
The Iraq dilemma
The second, and most important, reason for the current Turkish malaise is Iraq. Turkey provided some support, against the wishes of much public opinion, in the American war with Baghdad over Kuwait in 1990-1991: but this was over quickly and the main fighting took place far from Turkish frontiers in what Turks refer to as the gulf of Basra.
In the ensuing years Turkey profited from the smuggling and legitimate trade associated with the oil-for-food programme. When it came to the US invasion of 2003, the strength of opposition from Turkish public opinion and the Turkish state itself made no comparable accommodation with Washington possible.
The Turkish parliament refused to allow the US to use Turkish territory for the invasion and since then criticism of the United States has reached levels unprecedented even in the crises over Cyprus in 1963 and 1974. Matters were not helped when, later in 2003, US forces publicly humiliated a group of Turkish special-force soldiers captured in Sulaimaniya, Kurdish Iraq.
All of this has been accompanied by increasing Turkish nationalism and the spread of a suspicion among secular nationalists and Islamists alike that the US is using the occupation of Iraq to threaten Turkey, above all by allying itself with the Kurds in Iraq and so fomenting trouble among the Kurds of eastern Turkey.
This fear is openly stated by officials in Ankara: the first step will be the partition of Iraq into Arab and Kurdish states, they say, and this will be followed in a few years by the partition of Turkey, in a final realisation of the plan originally laid down in the notorious among Turks Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, against which Atatürk led his victorious national revolution.
All of this nationalism has had one other consequence: although the Turkish state has, in principle, granted rights to Kurds to publish, broadcast and speak in their own language, Kurdish politicians are too fearful of reprisals to exercise these rights.
For the Islamists there is the further charge that the US-Kurdish alliance is being promoted by Israel. Turkey has had good economic and military relations with Israel for years and these have continued despite greater criticism of Israels policies towards the Palestinians. Israeli planes practice in Turkish airspace, while a major twenty-year project to transport water in large container ships to Israel is going ahead. Turks and Israelis also share a sense of being the whipping-boys of Europe, and Turks frequently visit Israel the only country in the world where we are not treated with condescension, as one leading sociologist put it to me.
But while there is little sympathy in Turkey for the Arabs as such they betrayed us by siding with the British and French in the first world war the war in Iraq is seen as a major threat to Turkey, and also, as officials admit, as a reminder of how limited Turkish power is. While it has long been said that Turkey would intervene in northern Iraq to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish state, this would be much less likely if United States forces remain stationed there.
The AKP and domestic politics
Alongside these two major international problems, there is a third, domestic component of the Turkish malaise. This is uncertainty about the direction and strength of the ruling party, the Islamist AKP, in office since November 2002. At one level things have gone better than expected: the armed forces, who through the powerful National Security Council retain a major say in Turkish politics, have allowed the Islamist party to exercise power, while for its part the AKP has cast off some of its religious garb and is presenting itself as a progressive party, in contrast to the secular conservatives of the old elite.
One reason for concern, however, is that no one can be sure of its intentions. The AKP makes no secret of its intention to lift the ban on headscarves in public places, including government offices and universities. While many secularists are now ready to accept this, some see it as an initial step towards a referendum aimed at making the wearing of headscarves by women compulsory. Alcohol is still generally available in Turkey, but is gradually reducing in circulation: recently the press corps on the prime ministers eighteen-hour flight to Washington was outraged to find that there was nothing alcoholic to drink.
More broadly, no one is entirely sure whether the AKPs apparent enthusiasm for joining the EU is genuine or whether, in the end, it would prefer to fall back on a nationalist Islamist project rather then endure European interference on issues of social and political freedom. This uncertainty is compounded by the weakness of the opposition parties, the old secular Republican Peoples Party (CHP) and the rightwing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). By default this gives the AKP an almost free hand. We are living in a one-party state, said one intellectual concerned at the lack of opposition to the Islamist project.
Where does Turkey belong?
All this should be of concern to more than just the 70 million people of Turkey. It is indeed an anomalous country in both European and middle eastern terms: after spending an evening in a hotel ballroom with a hundred members of the Ankara business and political elite I felt in terms of political attitudes and the enthusiastic socialising of those present that in some ways Turkey was more like a medium-sized Latin American country, a Mexico, Peru or Argentina, that had ended up in the wrong place. But however it addresses its social and political problems Turkey remains critical to European relations with the middle east and is therefore central to the trans-national crisis both are now living through.
Herein lies the paradox, indeed the irresponsibility, of opposition to closer European involvement with Turkey: for only if it is possible to build a stronger relationship in which Europe, instead of indulging in a one-way discussion about what Brussels expects from Ankara, actually learns about and listens to Turkey, will the wider questions of Europe and the middle east, cultural difference and terrorism, be addressed. This is not, however, the way things are going at the moment, in western Europe or here, in central Anatolia. In the end it may be that Europe needs Turkey even more than Turkey needs Europe.
